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Asking whether coding is 'the new literacy' is a semantic distraction. It's a phrase that tries to build excitement, but distracts from the real question; is coding a skill worth teaching to every youth?

I believe the answer is yes. Through coding, kids can apply and solidify the math they learn in school in a useful way. It also builds a mentality of experimentation that can help with the sciences. It also makes use of writing in general, making english class even more relevant. Real programmers depend on writing well to communicate, which can make a huge difference (see stack overflow questions).

Also, the skill of 'modelling' systems can be practiced and taught through the construction of computer programs. It can be very useful to build reasoning skills that are useful even if the person never codes again. Many of the subjects taught in schools don't offer skills that can be used anywhere else but in that specific subject, and are only taught for the sake of 'forwarding the knowledge of that specific field', whereas coding seems to offer many skills that transfer over into other subjects.

As soon as you see the world IDLE you should already be skeptical that you will be receiving any real information. Sometimes this happens. I, too, had lols, and under no circumstance will I complain about that, even if it's "not what I signed up for" here at Slashdot. Besides, even if you guys have an "amazing point", hasn't this been said on here at least x amount of times already? where x = (uninformative submissions) * (0.20 * userbase) * 100;// Real original guys....

.... and hope that these organizations don't band together, start sharing innovations and start developing 'next level threats' as I'd call them. With those resources and people behind them, evil people could do bad things to the internet. Gah, lets hope not. Lets hope.

You are forgetting that when a big line of different capacities is released (all on the same speed from the same manufacturer..), then the only variable with any influence on price is capacity in GBs. The idea is to get them to buy the higher capacity 240GB SSD by offering a slightly better $/GB. Also, people have many programs to install these days and are looking especially at the capacity, when considering their additional xGBs of games they would like to put on their SSD.
Besides, when a higher speed comes out (It will keep doubling at least), everyone knows about the speed and the entire market is reassessed.

I just clicked on my achievement (5 point comment) and it said Message 27834164 not found. Just wondering if this was due to the change. Also, sometimes the footers get cut off, so I couldn't see every link at the bottom on the left, and on the right it said: 201, Geeknet (rather than 2011). These things don't actually matter at all but... yeah.

pin0chet writes "Modern smartphones contain ever-increasing volumes of our private personal data — from text messages to images to emails — yet many smartphone security features can easily be circumvented by thieves or police officers equipped with off-the-shelf forensics equipment. Worse, thanks to a recent California Supreme Court ruling, police officers may be able to search your smartphone for hours without a warrant if you're arrested for any reason. Ars Technica has an article exploring the legal issues surrounding cell phone searches and explaining how you can safeguard your smartphone from the prying eyes of law enforcement officers."

It says that he 'read data' and 'created graphs'. Couldn't whatever he was doing be automated? I'm sure that astronomers are already automating a whole lot of data analyzation, but for a random guy to find 4 irregularities, seems strange. Maybe high level pattern recognition is vital to the process he used? Get this guy, or somebody to start writing code.

By the time flying cars are possible or economical, most of our interaction and work will be done virtually, meaning that the need of transportation will be significantly lower. Therefore we won't really need the extra traffic capacity that the air would allow.

rats undergo a series of scientific experiments through the ages. They'll be the first to get neural implants that highly increase cognitive function. They'll be the first to connect to the internet directly through the brain. Aliens might assume they are more intelligent than us on first glance. Sitting around reproducing, reaping the rewards of science while humans do all the gruntwork...

asgard4 writes "Coming up with sound, elegant, and easy to implement designs is not a trivial matter, as Fred Brooks, author of the classic book The Mythical Man-Month, acknowledges in his latest book The Design of Design. In many disciplines — especially in software development — the design process and how to produce good designs is relatively poorly understood. Teaching the design process to students is even more difficult. In the form of opinionated essays, Brooks attempts to summarize what we know about the design process, how it has changed over time, and how we can produce better and more elegant designs. Brooks has decades of experience designing large systems and is well known for his involvement in the design of IBM's OS/360. Even though Brooks is a computer scientist, the book applies equally well to many other disciplines outside of software development that have a formal design process, such as architecture. A lot of his examples come from other engineering disciplines and architecture. But of course he presents the obligatory OS/360 case study as well." Read on for the rest of Martin's review.

krou writes "ReadWriteWeb is covering Google's embrace of a system that would enable any Web publisher to 'automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published.' Google's Brett Slatkin is lead developer of PuSH, or PubSubHubbub, a real-time syndication protocol based on ATOM, where 'a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published.' Subscribers then wait for the hub to notify them of the new content. Says RWW: 'If Google can implement an Indexing by PuSH program, it would ask every website to implement the technology and declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document, just like they declare where the RSS feeds they publish can be found. Then Google would subscribe to those PuSH feeds to discover new content when it's published. PuSH wouldn't likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google's existing index.' PuSH is an open protocol, and Slatkin says that 'I am being told by my engineering bosses to openly promote this open approach even to our competitors.'"